We are working in an environment where, there are thousand of regular meetings with the customer: operational, applications, finance, end user technologies….

This environment makes there are so many relationship with our client, what is very good.

Now we are trying to improve the way all these meetings are planned, celebrated and closed:

Is this meeting useful?

Are the key people attending to it?

Is the client feeling s/he is losing time?

Are meeting minutes right?

With the map of regular meetings we have discovered some stakeholders were not involved in meetings, what improve the relation with some key stakeholders that are not in front of a decision but that have influence on all of them.

So it’s being a long term exercise that is trying to improve our account communications. Let’s see how it works.

I have enjoyed reading this book, the experiences, the way to face problems, and the approach through the continuous prioritisation following the pareto principle, where in 80% of the cases, the solution requires only 20% of the resources needed to solve all cases.

The typical process is that a vehicle takes through a series of immersion or spray baths by the original equipment manufacturer (OEM).

These baths are: pre-treatment, electrocoat followed by a layer of primer, basecoat and clear-coat.

These five layers protect the vehicle underneath from corrosion, scratches and chips, while also improving its appearance, it is both expensive and time consuming.

Three leading global players are PPG Industries, BASF and Dupont.

The global downturn hit the automotive coatings sector hard.

In part, thanks to incentives introduced by many governments worldwide the industry is facing a more positive picture about the future. In Spain for instance these incentives has increased a lot the sales.

Sales are still very slow and this is going to be a difficult few years, (2012??).

Main goal now: cost and efficiency;

how?

Through innovation: trying to reduce the time required to apply the numerous layers of coatings to vehicles or compacting process technology.

The approach is to remove some of the baths after improve some of the others, so you reduce the time and the cost of the process.

Enterprise content management through Open Text solutions is very demanding due to the deep collaboration between SAP and Open Text.

SAP DMS seems to not support big volumes and Open Text integration is a recognized alternative that the industry has accepted as good solution: reduce implementation risks, reduction of TCO (of your SAP system), aligned with regulations.